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    An Okike Prize Anthology 2017
    An Okike Prize Anthology 2017
    An Okike Prize Anthology 2017
    Ebook156 pages2 hours

    An Okike Prize Anthology 2017

    By Okike Prize for Literature

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    About this ebook

    This is an anthology of literary works shortlisted in 2017 for the Okike Prize for Literature.



    This contains literary works from Shade Mary-Ann Olaoye, Victor Ugwu, Prosper Mayor, Precious Arinze, David E. Benson, Oladimeji Luqman, and many others.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPubliseer Publishing
    Release dateFeb 13, 2018
    An Okike Prize Anthology 2017

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    • 5/5
      It was an amazing read. I didn't expect to see do many young writers in one place. Their works are beautiful and reflect where Africa is with creativity.

    Book preview

    An Okike Prize Anthology 2017 - Okike Prize for Literature

    SECRETS

    Okike drink, it is for you that all gifts of creativity are sown.

    INTRODUCTION

    The Okike Prize for literature was founded by Uche Osita James and is a new literary initiative targeted at rewarding student writing in the three genres of literature.

    The Okike Literary prize was founded upon a perceived marginalization of young writers across Nigeria in relation to literary prizes. Most current literary prizes in Nigeria often have a wide scope of persons it is open to; this has negative effect since established writers and even former prize winners often come to compete against newer-emerging writers. The results are nothing short of insalubrious in the end. This position gave rise to this vision, to create a literary prize exclusively for undergraduates and a platform for them to compete on a level playing ground while rewarding their literary craft at the same time.

    And for this year’s maiden edition we have selected Acan Innocent Immaculate (Writivism short story prize winner 2011), Chiemerie Nnamani (Boabab Prize short list 2011), Emenike Mark Omeye (ANA Mazariya prize for poetry 2010), Obi - Light Chibuihe (winner of the WRR Nigeria Teachers award) and J. K Anowe (Recipient of Festus Iyayi prize for excellence in poetry) as our judges for the prize.

    The prize would serve to promote arts and culture among the youths populace, as well as encourage literary excellence, craft and all round creativity.

    This anthology serves as a reminder to all young writers out there in Nigeria that even for young blooming writers there is hope.

    We hope next year’s edition is better than this years  as we also encourage all those whose works may not have made it to this year’s anthology, to try again next year.

    Uche Osita

    Founder, Okike Prize.

    A POEM IS TOO GOOD FOR YOU, NSUKKA

    Shade Mary-Ann Olaoye

    (Winner Poetry Category)

    There is a certain kind of hate that grows

    In your heart for a city that burns with fire

    Like all things left to die,

    You start from the hill of starvation

    And walk with commas, adding to destruction

    There is a way I do not want to love you,

    You tell it

    Not in silence

    Or retribution

    Or in saying, I do not know

    To matters your heart calls by name

    Or dialect that travels round the foreign of your body

    But it responds to you in partial quotes

    Sometimes demanding the lower part of your body to be left between its fingers

    And because you cannot walk away naked of limbs,

    We stay on its tip, waiting to migrate

    To new colonies

    Or grow a new title

    HUNGRY PLACES

    It is funny how you awaken

    And what is inside is an ocean

    Filled with waves, fishes and water

    Sometimes, shark, eager for blood

    Wait to ravage

    And swallow you whole that

    You fold into the futility of water

    From yourself-yourself

    Swallowing parts

    And swallowing again

    Because sea is its own company

    Gathering in schools, waves

    And sums of tide

    To share stories at shore

    There is time to live and die, they say

    Only two seasons for sea;

    A TIME TO SWIM

    You stay afloat

    Weightless with happiness

    Smile from rays of sun

    Scattered in reflections on skin of sea

    Light moments

    When you are swimmer

    Whose only baggage is oxygen?

    Ready to unravel, cast net and find tasty meals,

    Gems stuck in the throat of sea

    A TIME TO DROWN

    Like soil after rain, wet in all hungry places

    And all there is

    Is the instinct of survival?

    For life,

    Like ants, you start to escape

    Through holes; the flesh of earth

    Because you are too soaked with death

    To hold on to happiness or

    Rip an anchor off joy

    PAPERBACK

    Victor Ugwu

    Perhaps those born after the war are those whose lives the war took.

    —Saddiq M Dzukogi

    Mother always wore the mirror

    As her uniform for men

    Whose bones brought cabins?

    And bread for Christmas

    It was in the table glass

    That saw more suns than sons

    That collected salts of her songs

    She is a paperback of too many books

    Too many shelves in her body her eyes are differences

    Between a maimed butterfly and an empty

    Mausoleum or love collected in different skin covers

    She’s to draw a leopard in a moon glass

    Tonight inside a bottle of painkillers

    Are flowers & glowers & browsers

    And the many meaning of a name

    Walking winter in appealing smells

    Of locust bean I watch her transiting

    Into the smokes of their burnt semen

    Collecting herselves into my face

    Preserving the sins and transcendence of her

    Failings until I crush into something maybe

    Vapour or air or smoke of something

    That’ll return to my daughter's face

    As every hair that picks a tulip skin

    Runs to places and meadows to grow

    Her stories in open prayers

    My daughter won't stop walking into herself

    Holding a lamp to search for memories

    My mother won't tell their whereabouts

    Neither would she stop to kneel on my pajamas

    Trying to draw my dreams out maybe there

    Might be a dot of him inside

    Hanging on the bumblebees the ones

    I dart into her head each time a ghost sucks her nipple

    LOVE IN BIRDSONG

    Prosper Mayor

    WE WERE NOT GODLINGS then

    We are not now

    Fading things, we savour

    The niceties of life in little drops-

    The sun seen through rheumy eyes

    The wind caressing feeble thighs

    Yes our feathers ruffle- bunched and patchwork grey

    And our wings no longer dare the wind and rain

    Our talons grasp the air

    And our tired bones dance- the awkward dance of the cold

    But our love was etched in stone, you and I

    In the secret corners of the sky

    Where our wings touched in moribund ecstasy

    Our lips in mellow birdsong

    Lifebound,

    We roamed this world alone

    Made one- by blood and song

    In the ultimate chemistry of flesh

    A duet, we were- two souls

    Whispering haunting strains in faded melody

    Till the void-

    Echoing through the silence of the vast azure sky

    Till you left me- aching blood

    To roam these skies alone

    WE: ORIGIN AND BURNS

    Precious Arinze

    Our biography is dusk: tranquil

    Horizon graded with ash, the colour of my mother

    Flecked with streaks of violet

    Pale residue of my father's burning

    Since my birth was an act of arson,

    I will always be half heat, half woman

    Tired of being rekindled, culture lined with scar tissue,

    A language folded in two,

    Burning with thirst

    I am searching for a name to give to my brothers

    Before they vaporize, and I am left

    Holding emptiness in my arms

    My sisters are unraveling like onion springs,

    Every slice a trauma our eyes are forced to witness;

    Mourning the chasm we call family; fair skinned

    Magnolias plucked mid-bloom and tossed

    Into the arbitrariness of night blackened

    By fire

    It is impossible to contemplate the loneliness

    We carry, the mistakes we carve out of ourselves

    Into lumps of coal that will feed a foreign flame

    Or my father as a young boy selecting the finest rocks

    Skipping them across Oghelli like dreams. Before he

    Learns to harm enough without leaving marks,

    Before my mother becomes therapy, spreadsheet

    For his pain we still will not name,

    Before that act of arson, before we begin

    To confuse rage and affection

    Before we remember to forget

    Love is a luxury measured only in burns

    My father is a young boy selecting the finest rocks,

    Skipping them across Oghelli like dreams. My father

    Says our people come from water, he omits

    To mention what set us boiling, says

    Water cannot bury fishes, but

    I know it once laid rest

    To generations of people

    Who look like us?

    If all that is true, I am carving

    My next mistake into a young boy

    Drowning

    Inside him

    Knowing all this, lover, if you ever find my love leaking

    In places it should not, finger the holes into a trauma

    Of silence, send to my mother to roll under her tongue

    When she carves out another mistake, a stale decade

    With my father, I will fill her lungs with sooty forgiveness.

    She will carry our ashes everywhere, one with the other,

    One absolving the other until dawn pierces through

    *Oghelli is a river in Enugu state

    VISIONS

    David E. Benson

    I

    (In a lightless room)

    I saw God melt like night on

    The tongue of a man

    He had neither the earthful of water

    Nor the city of fire in his mouth

    Under his tongue—like charm—

    A seed spread its roots

    Velvet as a question. . . 

    And God was the beginning of an orgasm:

    A spark of consciousness

    Rising from the womb of the earth

    II

    (After a moon painted the night)

    One night, a boy will chase himself into the places they said

    God ran from

    And he will not burn

    And he will not drown

    He would have made a better version of the heavens

    And the earth if his lover will lend him his lips

    But, he will be ambushed by the fleeing god halfway. . .

    He won’t become the colour of coal

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